Super Bowl I to air after long-lost footage surfaces

Legendary Packers Coach Vince Lombardi would win the Super Bowl again in 1968, but died just two years later. (AP)

The Super Bowl will air Friday night, and your money is safe if you take Green Bay and lay the 14 points.

The game airing at the end of this week on NFL Network was originally played Jan. 15, 1967, and pitted Vince Lombardi’s legendary Packers against the Kansas City Chiefs – a matchup of storied franchises still in the hunt to play in this year’s championship.

But even though that first Super Bowl aired on two television networks, no complete video version of the game existed until the network spliced one together using grainy film collected from dozens of sources.

“In an exhaustive process that took months to complete, NFL Films searched its enormous archives of footage and were able to locate all 145 plays from Super Bowl I from more than a couple dozen disparate sources.”

— NFL Network

“In an exhaustive process that took months to complete, NFL Films searched its enormous archives of footage and were able to locate all 145 plays from Super Bowl I from more than a couple dozen disparate sources,” the league said in a statement.

The CBS and NBC tapes were either lost or recorded over, although a full audio tape of NBC radio’s Jim Simpson and George Ratterman doing play-by-play and color commentary survived. That sound was dubbed over the video footage collected by the league network to produce a full game of future Hall of Famer Bart Starr leading the Packers to a 35-10 victory, aided by Jim Taylor’s running behind the vaunted offensive line that featured Fuzzy Thurston, Forrest Gregg and Jerry Kramer.

The game, which was played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, saw the Packers take a 14-10 halftime lead before burying the Chiefs with three unanswered touchdowns in the second half. No less than a dozen future Hall of Fame players took part in the game, including Kansas City quarterback Len Dawson and defensive stars Buck Buchanan and Bobby Bell. For the Packers, Starr, Turner, and Gregg would go on to enshrinement in Canton, along with linebackers Ray Nitschke and Dave Robinson; defensive backs Herb Adderley and Willie Wood and defensive linemen Willie Davis and Henry Jordan.

Lombardi and Kansas City Coach Hank Stram are also in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Billed as “The Lost Game,” the airing of Super Bowl I will take place on January 15 at 8 p.m. ET on NFL Network. According to the league, the presentation will include wired sound from Lombardi, the hard-charging coach who would be dead of cancer just three years later.